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uphold

verbattested in dialogue

  • //ˌʌpˈhəʊld//

To hold up; to lift on high; to elevate.

verb

  1. 1

    To hold up; to lift on high; to elevate.

    The mournful train/ Echoed her grief, [...]/ With groans, and hands upheld, to move his mind, /Besought his pity to their helpless kind

  2. 2

    To keep erect; to support; to sustain; to keep from falling.

    A man's pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.

    That misbegotten devil, Falconbridge, /In spite of spite, alone upholds the day.

    Uttering such broken ejaculations Mrs. Hart burst into a passion of tears, and only Lord Chetwynde's strong arms prevented her from falling. / He upheld her.

    Wednesday June 02, 2021, Has the Northern Ireland Protocol undermined the United Kingdom? Similarly, both the Government and the EU argued at the time the deal was agreed that they were upholding the Good Friday Agreement by implementing the Protocol.

  3. 3

    To support by approval or encouragement; to vindicate; to confirm (something which has been questioned).

    let any moral come along and she would uphold it

    but there was still a connexion upheld among the different ideas, which succeeded each other.

    We must continually separate out and clearly articulate that support for the Jews as a people has nothing to do with upholding the policies of the Israeli state.

Etymology

From Middle English upholden, equivalent to up- + hold. Compare Dutch ophouden (“to stop, cease, hold up”), German aufhalten (“to stop, halt, detain”). Compare also Middle Low German upholt, Old Norse upphald (“uphold, support”).

Forms

past tense
upheld
past participle
upheld, upholden
present participle
upholding
third person singular
upholds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).